Indiana native Peter Kassig, who later changed his name to Abdul-Rahman, served in the Iraq war and founded an aid organization for Syrian refugees.
The Kassig Family
The threat against Kassig's life came in a video released Friday by the terrorist group. The video shows the brutal execution of Alan Henning, a British humanitarian aid worker, then concludes by showing Kassig kneeling in the desert beside a masked man.
It's the latest in a series of videos released by ISIS, all of which show apparent beheadings. The videos uniformly end with a threat against a western ISIS prisoner, and so far the extremist organization has followed through with each of those threats.
Kassig originally hails from Indiana and his family still lives in Indianapolis. Though little is publicly known about Kassig's youth, he eventually studied political science at Butler University and later trained as an emergency medical technician. According to CNN, Kassig also married, then quickly divorced sometime after 2010.
According to a 2013 Time profile, Kassig deployed to Iraq in 2007. The Army later honorably discharged Kassig for medical reasons, his family reported Friday.
The Indiana native said he returned to the Middle East because he needed a change.
Kassig traveled to Lebanon after his divorce because he "needed to make a drastic decision" and because he "needed a game changer," he told CNN. Later, Kassig told Time he wanted "to better understand my role in the conflict in Iraq."
Peter Kassig / Via fundrazr.com
from BuzzFeed - Breaking http://ift.tt/ZE6bOB
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